The Project Factory today announced its move into online video production with the acquisition of a stake in the 360 video company, Panoramic Video.

The deal sees The Project Factory taking a Board position and 25% ownership of the company based on future targets.

Panoramic Video has developed a unique technology that allows online video viewers to view a complete 360 view of streamed video, showing all angles of the action, in front and behind the camera.

The technology has been deployed for music videos, festivals, real estate companies, news websites and tourism.

Guy Gadney, Director of The Project Factory says: “Panoramic Video is a radical technology that changes the way we view online video completely. It creates a fully immersive video experience that is currently lacking online.

“Panoramic Video is the most exciting online video technology we have come across and will be putting it at the core of the projects we are working on for the movie and television industries. It will revolutionise behind‐the‐scenes video for movies and television shows, adding a totally new dimension to exclusive online content and DVD extras.

“Needless to say, the advertising opportunities are game changers with the ability to embed clickable interactive ads in the video itself”.

Dean Poore, Founder and CEO of Panoramic video says: “Having a strategic alliance with The Project Factory gives us a great step up into the movie and television industry. We have spent significant time and energy developing our technology into a unique 360 online experience.

“Alongside The Project Factory, we are now looking forward to implementing panoramic video onto all entertainment sites that count video as a key part of their strategy”.

About The Project Factory

The Project Factory is a digital entertainment company specialising in multiplatform productions for movie, television and digital media companies.

The ‘Poh’s Kitchen’ iPhone App is a complement to the ABC TV show. It provides recipes, blogs and video from the TV series and is updated with new content every week. iPhone users can access full recipe details from the show, watch videos of Poh and her guest chef’s cooking each dish and get handy tips and tricks from Poh’s blog.

Download the Poh’s Kitchen iPhone app for free here

The Australian will be shortly following The Times and the NY Times in implementing the first phase of their content revenue strategy, or paywalls. With The Australian, what has been a decade and a half’s teaser campaign will now switch to the business model that is intended to show the future of the newspaper industry and arrest its decline.

This is a big day for newspapers in Australia. It is a big day for newspapers worldwide. It is a big day for any heritage media company with an eye on their future revenue streams. It is a big day because newspaper revenues and readership are in an unstoppable decline.

In 2005 in the US, newspaper advertising revenue growth was reported by the Newspaper Association of America at 1.5%. In 2006 it dropped to -1.7%. From 2007 until last year it has dropped by -9.4%, -17.7% and -28.6%. Put into layman’s terms, that’s: 2006 – “hmmm weird”. 2007 – “This is not good at all”. 2008 – “Oh shit.” 2009 – “Where’s my digital strategy?”.

If we look at readership figures locally, the optimistically-named Newspaper Works industry group reported an across the board drop of over 3%. As Crikey pointed out, this is the latest in a negative and accelerating trend: “The December quarter saw a total fall of 1.98%, the September quarter, 1.55%, the March quarter in 2009 saw a fall of 0.85%”.

The solution to this problem is simultaneously very simple and very complex.

The problem is that newspaper publishers currently think like newspaper publishers. This means that the structure of the organisation is still focused around sourcing news stories, creating articles and publishing them in a single brand entity – the newspaper or newspaper website.

With the introduction of paywalls, this will change. The solution is to realise that publishers are no longer publishers, they are retailers of content, and need to think like retailers. This is a step change from thinking like Rupert Murdoch to thinking like Frank Lowy.

From top to bottom, publishers need to change their culture to think like retailers, act like retailers and generate revenue like retailers. If a publisher says: “we already think like a retailer because we sell newspapers, magazines or video” then they are the equivalent of the alcoholic denying that there is a problem.

While this is a simple strategic solution, it requires a structural and complex transformation to succeed. A couple of years ago, this sort of transformation would have been an optional and left-field strategy that most publishers were too scared to contemplate. With the dual clashing rocks of a financial crisis and audience shifts due to digital technologies, this transformation has become a necessity for survival.

In the midst of this chaos, Apple launched the iPad.

The unique support for this new piece of technology from media companies worldwide has been unanimous as far as I have seen. Print media has been particularly vocal and rushed to embrace it. Rupert Murdoch’s quote summed up the prevailing mood at its launch: “I got a glimpse of the future…with the Applie iPad. It is a wonderful thing. If you have [fewer] newspapers and more of these…it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.”

The iPad is indeed a beautiful thing. The screen is high quality and the interface is simple. It appeals to media owners because it matches the level of vanity that they have about their content. Magazines, newspapers and books that are produced to be aesthetically pleasing can now be aesthetically pleasing away from these pesky computer screens and midget mobile screens. Editors can show off their title and say once more: “Look how beautiful my content is”. Indeed, the iPad and other tablets are perfectly designed to match the experience of a coffee table magazine – they are gorgeous couch devices and fit into our behaviour pattern of consuming glossy magazines: the lounge room, the bedroom, the kitchen, and travelling on the airplane. Initial native iPad apps from The Monthly, Editor’s Choice, the New York Times and Wired all fit this model.

Yet there is a something wrong here. A bum note in a symphony of approval.

In the mid-nineties, I ran a digital media and games company in London. A common conversation with potential clients went like this:

Client: “I need a website. Everyone’s got a website and we need one too.”

Me: “What would like on your website?”

Client: “Our brochure. We want the site to be just like the brochure. We have all the artwork on CD and everything!”.

What we were seeing was people shoe-horning old media into a new medium.

With the iPhone and iPad, the conversation is similar, except now people are wanting to put their website onto the iPhone, or worse still, exactly replicate the print experience. With page turns and everything.

This to me is the equivalent of making a movie of Lord of the Rings by filming someone turning the pages of the book and putting that on the big screen. Digital media devices are interactive beyond a page turn mechanism.

Older media folk like the iPad because it makes them feel comfortable about the direction technology is heading. It looks nice and it has a business model attached (albeit one owned by Steve Jobs who is surely the Frank Lowy of the digital world). To me, this is a dangerous assumption because the key development in digital media is its connection to the internet, not the resolution of the screen.

It feels like there is a mass seduction taking place at the moment with the iPad as the object of desire.

To visualise this at a recent presentation, I showed an image from the moment in the first Ghostbusters movie where Sigourney Weaver transforms into the lustful seductress, idolised and pursued by the equally transformed Rick Moranis. Content owners seem to be being seduced by the temptations of the iPad, while all the time Apple is rejoicing that it is getting unprecedented free marketing to support its underlying business model of selling hardware.

The situation we are in at the moment is a chaotic transformation of media as new content forms and new business models are being innovated at the speed of light. It is a time to understand that audiences are driving the change in media through their change in behaviour, which in turn is being driven by consumer technology.

It is the time to experiment prudently across multiple platforms, not just one, because that is how audiences are consuming content. And above all, it is a time to create content that uses the interactive power of the digital medium to create new ways of telling stories, rather than being seduced into republishing the same content by a technological beauty that really is only skin deep.

As mentioned, the council gives grants for arts projects, new media development, community building and the like. In the last six months or so, of the 30 various business associations that exist, around 60% of them have applied for funding to develop an iPhone application.

Yes, 20 chambers of commerce each representing around 70 businesses, all want their very own individual iPhone application.

When I heard this, I was horrified. What a waste of money! What a duplication of effort! And, given the demographic of the target market (transient shoppers, local business owners ad shop keepers), what a misdirected foray into the mobile space this would be!

Ah, but what a sexy, misguided foray!

And here lies the issue. Right now, a very large percentage of companies, businesses and brands are all suffering from i-blindness – the need to have an iPhone (or iPad) application that they can show off to people as gorgeous and sexy – whether it is the right thing to do or not.

Let’s try and all take a big deep breath. Yes, iPhone is a huge seller. Yes, the iPad is a very beautiful device to have on your knee while watching television. Yes, having your very own brand with its little icon the screen can give you a really warm and ‘with-it’ feeling. But it really isn’t always likely to give you much more than that.

There is definitely a right time and place for an iApplication. If your target market is highly mobile, trendy, style conscious and likely to use your service. If your mobile service really needs to use features of the phone that require an application to be running (such as special access to GPS or the address book, or camera). If you need to provide an application that can still deliver when 100 meters underground or in the air (or basically, whenever it can’t find a network or any kind). Or if you need to build in such security that you only allow access to your services via an encrypted secure connection.

There seems to be a huge section of the market that is uninterested in reaching out to the 90% of Australians without iDevices. Those consumers who might still want to get information, get updates, find out the scores, read the news or check out a house price. I would suggest that for most brands, companies and businesses – having a decent mobile presence through a mobile tailored internet site would be a start. Note I said ‘decent’. It doesn’t even need to be good. Having a site that recognises the incoming device (not hard) and selectes the right screen format (straightforward) and the right layout and navigation options (easily do-able) would suit both iPhone users and those with ‘substandard’ devices (ie, anything not iRelated). I won’t even start on thinking more broadly about handsets in general; the dominance of Nokia, the importance of Blackberry and the ongoing rise in Android devices.

And these 20 or so chambers of commerce? What about them? In most of their cases, having a web site would be a good start – and they can work on mobilising this after that. But starting with an iPhone application is not thinking about your audience, only your ego.

iPhone apps are the new black. But it isn’t a colour that is right for anyone.

Eat HTML for breakfast,
Flash & PHP for lunch,
Games engines and mobile apps for dinner?

The Project Factory is looking for a young gun to join our small innovative team that works across all aspects of digital media – from holographic installations through Google Android mobile games to websites for TV and film projects.

You should have top grades in a programming-related degree and be interested in working on the leading and bleeding edge of technology. You should know technologies such as Unity3D, J2ME and MySQL as well as the menu listed above – or be a very fast learner.

You should be able to show a creative spark in the work you’ve done to date, an elegance to your coding and be willing to work under pressure to meet deadlines.

The Project Factory is a multi-platform production company, producing digital media projects on mobile, PC, games and Facebook platforms among others.

With bases in both Australia and the UK, our projects are for international partners and clients as well as top tier companies here at home.

To apply, send your resume and covering letter to info@theprojectfactory.com.

It is natural that a major natural thump like a volcano should have a knock-on effect on reality, even in the rarefied reality of the MIPTV television conference in Cannes last week.

As news spread through the convention centre, television execs who once were super-confident media types descended into confused children, lost without control of their Outlook Calendar.

My first surreal moment happened the morning after the volcano struck, though I cannot say it was directly related. I was in the shower after a heavy night networking and drinking rosé wine. (Aside: I never drink rosé unless I am in France, and then I only drink rosé). In the shower the soap dish was at eye level and so directly in front of me was the small hotel bottle of shampoo. On the back of the bottle in large letters was the instruction “Avoid eye contact”. I instinctively turned away and stopped looking at it in case it popped its lid and sprayed molten sandalwood all over me. I gave it a quick sideways glance as I left my room, and deadlocked the door.

Out in the Palais des Festivals, it was dawning on everyone that having the whole of UK airspace closed was going to impact on everyone. This appeared to be a major issue for most people who absolutely had to get to other conferences, meetings, loved ones, dinners in other countries. I tried to reassure them that actually these were not that important in the grander scheme of things, and that a volcano erupting and covering most of northern Europe’s stratosphere with a sulfuric cloud was probably a valid excuse to cancel. Personally I was also still trying to reconcile my own issues with a bottle of shampoo that had instructed me to stop eyeballing it. A volcano exploding was just another surreal moment.

To be fair I had my own personal deadline to be back in London for the weekend as I was looking forward to catching up with my sister who I had not seen for a long time, and who was going to meet me in London when she got back from a short break in Italy. We had worked to get our flight times closely synchronised so I was upset that I was going to have to break the plans.

Given that the largest episode of Race Around The World had just started since Germany invaded Poland, I also figured that any bright travel idea that I had would undoubtedly be shared by half a million others. This was the time to zig when everyone else was zagging.

With the other Aussies in MIP we talked about taking the Eurostar to Paris and then to London. This would be a lovely romantic European journey speeding through the French wine countryside at an epilepsy-inducing speed. But half a million people had also thought of this and the trains were already full for four days. Indeed, a few Eurostar employees had also realised this and had put up the price of a single train ticket to 900 Euros. Given the French train workers were also in strike, the French rapidly became a ‘target demographic’ for all the wrong reasons. We spent most of dinner that evening trying to find a translation for “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

We looked into renting a car and driving, but I have a feeling half a million other people had also thought of this and the Channel tunnel would be seeing stationary traffic for a while.

In a flash moment of genius (well more of a slow recognition of a good idea but it was the fastest thought I had had all morning), it dawned on me that my dear sister in Italy would also be struggling to get back to London, so why not just hop on a train to Italy.

I had inter-railed a few times as a teenager and the rail networks could not have possibly changed in the past twenty years, so I packed up early on Friday morning and, dragging suitcases so heavy that they could have stopped any airplane far more effectively than a volcanic cloud, I walked through the cobbled streets of Cannes to the train station.

Feeling very happy to be setting off on a European adventure again, I bought my ticket and ran onto the train which had mysteriously appeared twenty minutes before its scheduled time. Just as I was about to dive through the closing train doors, the nice lady who ran my B&B in Cannes appeared like magic next to me. I think I gave her the same sideways glance I gave the shampoo bottle as she said: “Monsieur, votre carte de credit” which I must have left on the counter when I was paying for the room. I gave her an enormous and slightly incredulous Thank You before grabbing the card like Indiana Jones’ hat before the doors completed their guillotine closure. The French have managed to filter their French Revolution death technology subtly into their current day public transport system with admirable success.

I knew I would have to change trains a few times between Cannes and Florence, but with a day in hand and now a credit card in the pocket, it would be a time to embrace randomness and see what the Universe had to offer.

The first change was at Nice for the train to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. The platform number for this train changed three times in the ten minutes before departure. If this were Central Station, it would not have been so much of an issue as all platforms are easily accessed by walking to end of the platform and moving to the next one. In these stations, all platform access involves dragging my cases down a couple of flights of stairs to the pedestrian tunnel under the platforms, and then back up again when you reach the platform number. A subconscious thought dropped into my head, as I wondered how my chiropractor is.

On board the train I realised that I had been right that nothing had changed in the past twenty years. At all. In fact I might even have been in this very carriage when I was travelling in Italy before. I casually checked to see if my ‘I heart’ graffiti was still there.

Anyway, with time on my hands I thought it would be a good moment to recharge the prepaid local mobile I had. After all, I needed to text the crew in Cannes that all was well and I had not just disappeared, and I needed to text my sister that I was coming to see her in Florence.

The train route between Nice and Ventimiglia hugs the mountainous coastline, providing stunning and luxurious views of the small towns and villages and the Mediterranean sea glistening temptingly in between the railway’s tunnels. I made a discovery on the journey that the open air railway sections last almost exactly the time it takes to phone the pre-paid recharge number, enter a 16 digital credit card and expiry date, but not quite long enough to listen the autovoice repeat the number so you can then press 1# to confirm the recharge before the train enters the tunnel and the line cuts out. I am absolutely not exaggerating that I repeated this routine 7 times between 7 consecutive tunnels before switching the phone off.

As we reached Ventimiglia, every mobile in the carriage beeped simultaneously as the Italian phone networks SMSed their “Welcome to Vodafone Italy” message.

In Ventimiglia, it was easy to buy a ticket to Florence. Well, easy once you realise that Florence is called Firenze in Italian, that you need three tickets instead of one, and that all of the automatic ticket machines declined my credit card.

Oh and of course now the French pre-paid network does not work in Italy so all communications were officially down.

PART DEUX - PRIVATE JETS, HIRE CARS AND IPADS

The global company Power Gen has offices in many countries and it localises its websites into different territory. Each local site has its own domain name, thus powergenuk, powergenfrance, and the unfortunately elided powergenitalia.

Gazing out of the train to Florence and thinking of this made me laugh out loud. So much so that the people sitting around me all gave weird looks. I got back to playing Flight Control on the iPad.

The volcano had now closed Paris airport and the cloud was expanding east and south. Yet the story was slipping down to second or even third position on the Guardian website. Being in the midst of this, I can see the chaos that is building. With each day that goes by around 17,000 people get bumped from their booked flights and join the queue of people wanting to get home. There is a set number of allocated flights that airports can handle every day. So for every day that goes by, the problem grows. As I reach a score of 78 on Flight Control, I realise what dire problems would occur if too many planes were to appear at an airport simultaneously. Especially if I was an air traffic controller.

I change trains for the fourth time at a town called La Spezia for the final leg to Florence. On the platform are a young American couple on their honeymoon. They look at my lack of rucksack and ask me what I am doing travelling through Italy. “Escaping the volcano cloud” I say. They look at me strangely and start to move away. “But…but…haven’t you heard about the volcano”. They say this is the first they have heard of it as they do not speak Italian so only watch MTV. Even when the apocalypse arrives, there will be people whose last image as the world burns will be the latest Lady Gaga duet. Not a bad image, come to think about it.

Florence railway station is buzzing at rush hour. I have been on trains now for 10 hours and offline for the same amount of time. The cab driver understands my elementary Italian - a combination of Spanish, French and Super Mario Bros.

The cab winds its way out of Florence up to the small hillside town of Fiesole, arriving up the crunching gravel driveway of the Villa San Michele as the sunset over the golden domes of Florence. I smell of trains, of other peoples’ perfume, of airbrakes and oil, of Albanian labourers, dogs, cigar smoke and faulty air-conditioning. Whatever. I am in need of a weekend of rest, and have just arrived in a C16th converted monastery where the staff call me Mr Guy, where there is a heated outdoor pool, unlimited prosecco, Molton Brown bathroom accessories and ethernet into the room.

The next morning I wake up to an email from EasyJet. “A volcanic eruption in Iceland is pumping clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. We are very sorry but your flights have had to be cancelled due to the risk from volcanic ash”. I top up the bath with Prosecco and forget about the world.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, a clock has started ticking. It is Saturday and my Qantas flight is due to leave on Wednesday at midday to go back to Sydney. I am missing my partner and my 17-month-old son. My seat at the dinner table in Sydney has been filled by a laptop running a Skype video call for 10 days. When he reaches out to daddy, he hits the space bar. The chilled Zen approach is starting to wear off, and I do not want to have that flight cancelled.

Aside from catching up with my sister’s family, there is an option of hitching a lift with them from Florence to London via private jet. At a time where flexibility is the answer, hopping onto a Netjet flight at any point we want seems like a genius idea. This is a world where the pilot turns around and asks if you are ready to take off, and where the seats not only go forward and back, but can rotate as well. It’s like dodgems on rails at 30,000ft.

Unfortunately, jets are airplanes just like any other jet plane, and on Saturday afternoon the Managing Director of Netjet sent out the totally responsible but galling email that they had cancelled all flights and were not taking any bookings for a week. Over dinner, we decided to drive back from Florence to London, and try to get a berth on the car-train through the channel tunnel.

Three adults, two kids. Two laptops loaded with games, two iPhones, one iPod touch and an iPad. A drive through four countries with the appropriately celebratory goal of reaching Reims, the capital of Champagne.

It is 8am and we crunch down the driveway and through madly narrow Italian roads as the fog lifts from in between the vines around Florence. Overnight, Florence airport has been closed, eastern European airspace has closed down, and Spain has been added to the list of affected countries. The cost to British Airways has been quoted as 130m pounds per day.

While the short-term impact of the volcano has been air travellers, there will be a rapidly increasing impact on other sectors as international deliveries are cut off completely. Flowers from Holland, international courier deliveries including my Amazon orders, Ebay purchases. The loss of trade is much larger than just airlines.

We also do not know the health impact of this cloud. I cannot believe that the health ministers are publicly saying that when tonnes of invisible particles of volcanic glass and lava descend back to the ground it will not have an impact on our health, as well as livestock and crops. While I am not holding my breath about making my flight back to Sydney on Wednesday, I feel that holding my breath is exactly what we should be doing normally. Should we be wearing masks?

We power-drive through Europe in shifts. Through northern Italy and into Switzerland. We hear that there are traffic snarls through the motorways of central France. We thank the satnav gods for directing us through Switzerland. It is raining and the mountains are steep and sharp. They are impressive but are dark, jagged and not alive with the sound of music. It is a relief to be in the long tunnels, even the claustrophobic 15-kilometre Gottardo tunnel. There are moments of stationary traffic through tollgates and borders, but nothing we cannot make up on the open freeways.

As we re-enter France, the kids have exhausted two iPhones. The iPad is holding up admirably. The kids are playing Doodlejump, Bondi Rescue, Sally’s Spa and Jungle Crash. I have got them testing the latest version of the Project Factory’s new iPhone game called Scratch and got great feedback. As the iPad dies, I bring out the secret weapon of a PSP and we buy a car charger for the various Apple devices.

My filmmaker brother-in-law has never seen so many gadgets in one place and I sense that there is mild sense of worry about what all these games may be doing to their imagination and sociability. Naturally, I think it’s a good part of their development, and anyway it keeps the car atmosphere positive and fun. I have called myself the Arcade Manager.

We arrive in Reims around 10pm. The hotel is gorgeous and we tuck straight into champagne and a coq au vin. I locate all the power sockets in my room and start what my 8-year-old niece calls “The Holy Rechargingness” in preparation for the journey tomorrow. The iPad sleeps well.

It is early on Monday morning. A week ago, I had a full day of meetings with clients, partners and potential investors in London. These have all been shunted and we are now en route to Calais. The newspaper headlines are talking about five days of airspace closure. I post a Facebook update giving odds of 3:1 against Qantas opening flights by Wednesday.

As we leave the hotel, the concierge tells us that a number of people arrived late into the night having got snarled up in the traffic from Italy to France. There is no sense of triumphalism that we avoided it, merely an acknowledgement that we need to get going to meet the booking time across the Channel.

Close to Calais, we pass a taxi packed with suitcases with Lisbon number plates. Lisbon! I look through the windows and see an unshaven taxi driver looking a bit like Saddam Hussein did when he was caught by the Americans. This will have been the fare of his life. Later at Calais, I bump into the taxi again and talk to the occupants. They paid 2,200 pounds for the journey. “We just needed to get home”, they say. They have not shaved for a couple of days and look exhausted. As the cab driver leaves, I watch him pause at the first roundabout as if taking a deep breath before starting back to Portugal.

I call Flight Centre in Sydney and start to plan the other options. As this stage, these boil down to a single decision about whether to stick within the system and trust it, or break out and go freelance. Sticking within the system will involve waiting in London for the airways to clear, for the booking systems to unclog, and rolling dice about when my flight will be rebooked. The advantage here is to accelerate our plans to expand The Project Factory into the UK and reschedule the meetings. Freelance will involve taking a train to Athens or another southern European city, and aiming to get a flight from there. This should get me back to family and all the booked pitches and projects closer to schedule.

PART THREE - THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

I am so used to staying in hotels that I nearly stole the bathmat from my mum’s apartment this morning.

Yesterday we had crossed under the channel tunnel in the awesome car-train. It is awesome not only as a feat of engineering, but also because it feels like you are driving into the belly of a riot van. The outside looks like sheet steel and the windows are reinforced and let in light with the reluctance of a nightclub bouncer.

We have been met at Calais by a driver from my brother-in-law’s movie company. He drives like he’s been watching Jason Statham movies and actually managed to kick up dust reversing up the M25 to get to an exit he missed.

We stop at a café. The whole experience is unbelievably crap. The first thing you see when you walk through the semi-functioning sliding doors is an orange cone in the middle of the entrance warning that a tile is broken. The men’s toilets are broken. But worst of all, Wimpy still exists. The company that pioneered the square hamburger in the eighties has survived and rebranded. And what a rebrand! I would love to have been part of the brief to the agency. I imagine it went something like this: “Hi. We are a hamburger chain that has somehow managed to bump along the bottom of the fast-food chain for years without actually going bust. We have a few motorway outlets where we can afford the cheap rent. We do not know whether we will be around next year, and we want all this reflected in our new brand design please.”

The logo has shrunk in between the burger buns, leaving the sort of empty space that mirrors the queues for their food. It really looks like someone has left a burger in an air-conditioned room for 15 years, and it has woken up as a logo.

After inhaling a toasted panini that looks like roadkill, Jason Statham takes off again and an hour later we arrive in London. The iPads are surgically removed from the kids and we look at the progress of the volcano cloud which is still spitting out from Iceland. The unpronounceable name of the volcano is Eyjafjallajokull which I have anglicized as i-ya-faaka-y’all.

We check the status of flights on the Qantas website, and it is now that I get the news that I did not want. 36 hours before QF31 leaves London for Sydney, it has been cancelled.

I call Qantas to rebook, and have two options: Upgrade to a one way business class for $8,300 which leaves on 27^th April, or hang tight until the first available flight on 1^st May. 1^st May!

This is not a hard economic decision, but I am gutted to remain as a Space Bar Dad via Skype for the next ten days.

And thus the next week or so will witness the birth of The Project Factory’s London office. Today we have opened up channels into two agencies, two television channels and have been asked to submit pitches to two European broadcasters for transmedia shows. It’s a new dawn and a new day.

As I said goodnight to my 6-year nephew last night, he playfully punched me in the chest like an Italian Boss and, a propos of nothing, said: “I got two words to say to you. Don’t give up the dream, buddy.”

Jago, the next ten days will be for you.

[EPILOGUE: Thanks to Flight Centre, Guy managed to reschedule his flight to the 28th March 2010 - only four days after the original schedule, and just in time to arrive at Sydney airport and go straight to see Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet play live at Sydney Entertainment Centre.  Gold!…..]

[First published by Mumbrella.com.au. Thanks Tim!)

TV used to be (and still pretty much is) a sit back medium. We throw ourselves on the couch, grab the remote and check out either what is on, or what we have recorded that might be suitable for how we’re feeling. Rarely, these days, is appointment viewing high on our agenda. We are looking to spend some time be talked at, watching, viewing and participating really only by offering our attention, but not our comment, intellect or viewpoint.

The iPad has been picked up by publishers, content producers and advertisers as heralding the ‘new format device’. Given that iPhone really did revolutionise the mobile handset market with a set of concepts and implementations never seen before, we tend to forget that the iPod was a very late entrant to the portable music market. The iPad isn’t the first tablet we’ve seen and I’d also argue that it isn’t necessarily the best, but it is the one from Apple and that logo itself makes it important, as the logo talks to our expectations about what we want, where we will go and what we will do. (For some alternatives, check out the Joo Joo, the WePad and the Courier.)

What seems to be happening in the take up of this device is that applications are being developed which are a throw-back to a Web 1.0 world (ok, maybe 1.5). Specifically, not the 2.0 world that many of us have come to love. It seems that in many ways, the iPad is being embraced as providing a lovely big screen on which we can consumer, but not participate.

Much of this is, admittedly, down the way in which applications are being developed for the device more than the iPad itself. Referenced previously by Jeff Jarvis in his excellent piece, the Time Magazine iPad App seems to be the most extreme version of this. It is essentially an eMagazine (PDF) with some extras like a link here and a video there, but we are not invited to participate in in any meaningful way. Unlike  the web version, we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in; we can blog about it. And for this, we can either pay nothing on the web (attention only) or $4.99 a week for the iPad version. But, as Jarvis says, the pictures are pretty.

Jarvis has gone as far as boxing back up his iPad and shipping it back to Apple (although he admits that he might go out and buy one if the apps become compelling enough), stating “I simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use.”

Cory Doctorow, living advocate of giving away his content online,finding and audience and making money out of being free, is even stronger in his comments. Over on BoingBoing, in a richly empassioned piece, he quotes

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

I have to say, I laughed when earlier in the article he quoted Danny O’Brien calling the iPad “the second coming of the CD-ROM revolution” (fortunately for those lucky enough not to know, O’Brien does go on to explain what the CD-ROM revolution was).

More importantly, we have in the iPad a great interactive device that, once we get over the initial ‘wow’ factor, has many of us scratching their heads about it. Why would we use it? What would we use it for? Where would it fit into our lives? Melissa provided a great link to a tag cloud that might show some intent for more than the couch.

In concluding, I have to acknowledge that Apple may well have a rabbit up their sleeves that I can’t imagine. In the case of iPod, we had music, but no way of managing it easily (until iTunes came along) or buying it with one click (until the iTunes Store arrived). The iPhone was a breathtakingly obvious device that no-one before Apple had really thought about so holistically.

Much of the iPad’s future success is going to be in the hands of developers choosing to find new and clever things to do with this device other than just have beautiful rich images on it.  Maybe the iPad isn’t another G5 Cube….

Yes, it’s like a big iPod Touch.

Now, some specifics:

The device is, as we would expect, beautifully packaged, comes with a great cover and the screen is a delight. It sync’ed natively with iTunes, which, as I have an iPhone, would be have surprising if it hadn’t. As I am signed up to the Australian iTunes Store I am, until the device is released here, unable to access the Apps Store on the iPad so I did all my loading via my (Windows) desktop.

The most obviously missing things are: Clock and a native iPad Facebookapp and the omission of these is surprising. Clock is handy for reminders, alarms and world time and could have been a great ‘dock’ app for the device. Facebook as we used both the iPhone app for Facebook and Safari with differing but unsatisfactory results.  The iPhone app looked stretch and out of content in this large screen and really offered nothing over the app on iPhone. Under Safari, issues of screen management came to the fore - when we pulled up the chat window, we discovered this was not independently scrollable from the rest of the screen - basically it was docked and locked in position and size - meaning friends with names lower in the alphabet were inaccessible.

There was also a real disappointment  on the touch screen itself. It worked absolutely fine - but it left big smears over the large glossy screen. And yes, I did wash my hands. The compromise between regular polishing and a screen guard is going to be a serious consideration.

In terms of functionality, I found I missed the ‘always connected’ nature of my iPhone. When I went to show the device off in public (to much exclamation), with no wifi, it was basically a very pretty, but pretty dumb device. That said, when I showed off a view videos and animations, there were definite ohh’s and ahh’s.  I should point out that one really impressive iPhone app that just looks glorious even at (2x) was Firemint’s Real Racing GTI. They have an iPad version of the paid game (at twice the price of the iPhone one - not certain of the value equation here) but the good ol’ iPhone free games looks glorious.

There was a bit of a dose of reality at the hands of Lulu, our in-home GenC critic. She looked at it, exclaimed over the ‘big iPhone’, played with a few things then looked up and said ‘But what would I use it for?’. It’s too big for her handbag, no good for public transport, kinda fun for uni but not so functional without a keyboard, limited in terms of connectivity (to be address, I know), can’t be expanded and really, as far as she could tell, just didn’t fit into a gap in her life.

In the end, we agreed that it was a ‘kitchen’ or ‘couch’ device. The appeal of TV watching while wifi surfing on this screen is immense (even Lu thought so). the screen on your lap would be likely to be more compelling than the one on the other side of the room. Given that more than 87% of us already use internet connected devices while we watch TV, I can only suggest that we’ll be doing it even more - and more of us doing it!

In terms of native applications, what is clear is that some get it and some don’t. Clearly some developers have shipped out HD version of apps and not thought about the impact of a different environment, while others have serious looked at what and how they develop.

Now Playing is an example of the former:

While Epicurious is a good example of a real rethink about navigation, docking a Control Panel into the top bar and using tabs both right and bottom as appropriate. (Ok, that’s about five types of nav in one app and not brilliant, but it is an attempt.

As a kitchen or couch device - the iPad is perfect. A central hub for quick internet, great (lifestyle) dedicated apps such as the example above, music hub and video store; linking other iDevices and being a great lean forward companion to the sit backTV screen.

And it is this last element that I will explore more - I think the iPad is a throw-back to a ’sit back’ age, and that’s why publishers and advertisers like it so much. And that gives me pause for thought. More on this next, but in the meantime, I am going to love watching and reading and listening on this glorious visually beautiful screen.

(PS: we’ve developed our first app for this device, so I’ll also talk about that in a later post)

Branded content seems to be a marriage made in heaven.

- Content has always been difficult to fund. Even if you are James Cameron. Marketeers have attractive budgets that can help out.

- It is difficult to get in front of audiences outside of traditional ad formats. Long-form entertainment seems to hold audience attention for long periods of time, which is attractive to marketeers.

Yet rather than a marriage, branded entertainment is often more of a sloppy one-night stand where neither parties expectations are met. Clearly there is more subtlety required.

I think branded content can broadly be split out into two areas: Tactical and strategic. Tactical is where a brand takes out a sponsorship within a show to have its product featured in an integrated way –Tefal in Masterchef. Strategic is where the brand takes a controlling interest in the content – such as Johnson’s baby with Babycenter.com.au. Telstra’s content play owning the online and mobile rights to sporting codes in Australia would be another one.

The examples above I would put forward as successful branded entertainment plays. But branded entertainment is a fine balance. Overt branded entertainment works better for older, less media savvy audiences. Brands trying out branded entertainment to younger audiences run the risk of looking like the dad on the dancefloor trying to have a good time. Transparent commercialism is going to be sniffed out in a heartbeat.

Because above all, we must remember that audiences will buy into a branded entertainment experience because of the entertainment. Maybe this was easier with the more stable media habits of the fifties with the introduction of the Soap Operas, but now with the pace of technology, entertainment trends change faster than you can say “branding sign off”. Technology developments are at the heart of both entertainment and marketing experiences. Finally, we are entering a golden age of content, and a golden age of marketing, simultaneously.

This is an age of “and”, not “or” where multiplatform entertainment and a multiplatform marketing campaign can fit perfectly, with technology at the core. As Joseph Jaffe put it in “Life after the 30 second spot”:

“Madison and Vine was just a pit stop in the middle of nowhere”. Madison and Vine and the Valley is where it’s at.

So what we need is not just marketing skills, not just brand skills, and not just entertainment skills, but a careful balance between all three. Marketing should promote the product, but the product itself is not marketing.

This is not easy. But good things emerge when there is a challenge. To quote from The Third Man: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonard Da vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love -they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“And unless we fully take account of how these changes are reshaping the world around us and work out new ways to reach audiences and diversify our revenues then we, queens of the screen, probably deserve the same nightmarish fate as the princes of print.”

Having worked in the digital strategic teams of various broadcasters in the UK and Australia, it was good to see the CEO of a broadcaster making this call. It is rare, it is bold, and it is vital that this message comes from a company’s CEO as it is only the CEO who can effect the strategic change required to integrate the changes required to build a digital transformation within the business.

In preparation for our Transmedia Storytelling session this year at MIPTV (Tuesday April 13 2010), one of the topics of conversation has been how pro-digital we should be with an audience of television executives. Given the integrated approach that transmedia projects require, the argument is that we avoid ruffling feathers within television networks, and celebrate the individuals who have supported digital projects within the networks.

My view, however, is that it is important in this period of chaos that we tell the truth clearly and loudly: audience behaviour has changed and it is important for the continued success of television networks that they invest in new forms of content that match this change.

This means that the CEOs of broadcast networks need to incentivise commissioners, marketing departments, sales teams and promo producers to understand the behaviour of digital audiences, and support projects from the ground up.

Australia punches above its weight in independent transmedia production companies.Recently the Australian government gave the free-to-air networks a A$250m (€170m) rebate on the broadcast licence fees triggered by “the advent of the internet”. This rebate should not be a lozenge to the bottom line, it should be used as the opening to create a committed digital content strategy, and to execute on that strategy.

A dollar invested in digital is worth more than a dollar invested in mono-platform production, wherever in the world it is spent.

This blog post was first published by MIPTV 2010